It’s no secret that there are multitudes of student organizations and clubs at Union. In fact, when I tried to find an exact number, I didn’t have time to count every club on the comprehensive list I found. Not terribly shocking; college students are busy.
Union has a lot of organizations, and they all seem to be happening at the same time. Last night, as an officer for Life139, we had to ask another organization to leave our regular meeting room. This morning, I told a friend that I can’t make it to the knitting/crochet club meeting tonight because Letters in Motion is meeting at the same time, and Delight Ministries meets right after. During the first half of the semester, planning events for my Life Group around all of their club commitments — as well as my own, and my partner’s — was more challenging than any math test Dr. Hail could throw at me.
With all these organizations to choose from, it’s no wonder I’m always “running around like a chicken with my head cut off.” I steal that quote from my roommate Olivia Netland, a sophomore broadcast journalism major and president of a club herself.
Over our traditional cobo (ahem; Brewer Dining Hall) breakfast, Netland told me about her plans for the day. As president of Letters in Motion, she had to run a box of colorful construction paper letters to the Carl Perkins Center downtown. She also had to figure out what officer roles she needs filled next semester, find a way to order affordable merch for her active members and attend senate later that night. She told me all of this while composing a message for her club GroupMe.
Letters in Motion is an organization that writes letters to children from the Carl Perkins Center For The Prevention Of Child Abuse. Their goal is to promote literacy while encouraging and inspiring the children in their everyday lives.
Netland said that her club had a total of four members when she became president last year. Since taking her role, she has seen a substantial growth in membership, with an average of 10 attending members per weekly meeting. Even so, Netland takes on the bulk of the officer positions that a larger club would distribute to multiple people.
When I asked Netland if any part of her role was easier than she had expected, she laughed and said, “Being president in itself! I thought that being president would be a lot harder than it is. Taking the position of being senator, secretary, and vice president: those jobs I found, in a combination of each other, much more difficult to maintain than being president.”
By comparison, a bigger organization can afford to delegate its leadership roles. While that delegation can lighten the pressure put on a busy president’s shoulders, an established club still faces its own set of challenges with a full officer staff and a large group of members.
“[The hardest part of leadership is] the responsibility of making decisions for other people, that affect other people,” Lydia Cyrus, senior social work major and team director of Delight Ministries, said. “It sounds really bad, but sometimes you just have to make executive decisions for a whole organization and you’re like, ‘I hope this turns out the way I want it to,’ you know? You don’t want to compromise the relational aspects of partnership with other leaders. You don’t want to compromise valuing their opinion, their involvement, but sometimes at the end of the day, it’s on you to make those hard decisions. Sometimes you just have to pray and trust that you made the right decision.”
No matter the size of an organization, the leader of the group not only works to engage people in their mission but to keep members coming regularly. There is the initial attention-grabber, such as the Campus Life Fair to entice freshmen who are hungry for on-campus involvement. The problem is that freshmen tend to get involved in everything they can get their hands on until they find their “place”; the challenge of the club president is to keep them invested.
“One of the main ways we’ve been able to [promote the club] is by participating in the campus fair,” Netland said. “We were able to set up a booth for Letters in Motion and let people know more about our club and what we do. That was very helpful in recruiting new members.”
Additionally, Netland spoke about the importance of communication with members outside club meetings. As Cyrus told me, building these relationships is also an integral part of building community in a larger organization like Delight Ministries.
“I hopefully don’t just see them on Tuesday nights at 7:00,” she said. “Even just asking like, ‘How can we pray for you this week? What do you have going on this week that’s hard or good, and how can I celebrate that with you or go through that hard thing with you?’ You’re not just a number. We want to see you and your story … and invite you into our stories as well.”
In that community-focused goal that Cyrus and the other leaders at Delight Ministries cultivate, the role of a club leader is a rewarding one in spite of its difficulties. As leaders like Netland and Cyrus exemplify, a good president leads their club in a direction that both aligns with their mission and benefits their members in the best way possible.
This is not an easy task to manage, but the fruit is worth the planting.
“It brings me so much joy to see people join an organization that is helping other people, especially children,” Netland said. “It was so exciting for me to see all these people come in and share their love for literature, for God, and for children, and being able to put all of that into a letter to children that needed the inspiration and the hope. It makes me smile because I feel like, at the beginning, the club was so small… and [we have] grown much more. Being able to be president and see that change has been really exciting.”
“It’s so rewarding,” Cyrus said, “to be able to, you know, invest so much in an organization that’s invested so much in you. It’s really hard, but like, I know why I’m doing it. I’m not doing it out of my own strength; the Lord has equipped me to do this.”
Letters in Motion meets every Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. in PAC C-8, and Delight Ministries meets every Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. in the Bowld Student Commons room 247.
